Posted
by
timothyon Saturday October 10, 2009 @11:31PM
from the gradual-process-gets-noticed dept.

ericatcw writes "Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites like RapidShare, reports Computerworld. According to anti-piracy vendor V.I. Labs, 100% of the warez in its survey were available on RapidShare, which, according to Alexa, is already one of the 20 largest sites in the world. V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally."

obviously, when u stamp out one source....and not the demand, a new source will come to existence to fill in that demand.

Rapidshare, Megaupload, netload, etc. have been around for a while and do have legitimate uses (some times, trying to send to a 20MB PDF or Illustrator (.ai) advertising file can wreak havoc on email, especially with some of the free email ones or if your client is a small business).

Some opensource apps also use the services to host mirrors to their downloads to lighten the load on their own servers.

Actually, moving to paid services is one of those short-sighted, brain-dead lemming moves the general public gets involved in periodically. This is simply so because most such sites need actual payment to download (unless you want to download 1 file per 24 hours at something like 10k/s in the "free", "oh how much faster it would go if you only gave us your Credit Card number", "trial" mode - and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature).

The end result is that there is a complete trail of uploaders, their IP Addresses, their emails, but what's even better, there is a complete trail of all downloaders, including their IP Addresses, emails, user ids and, the Holy Grail of RIAA, MPAA and BSA snooping campaigns: actual financial transactions of these donwloaders which immediately yield their identities and bonus preculde any possible defense of "sharing between friends" as there is actual money changing hands.

In short: stupidity squared on the part of any people who use RapidShare, MegaUpload and a bunch of similar scams, people who have no clue about the implications of their actions and were, due to their ignorance of technology driven into arms of these scams by the PR campaigns against P2P, people who got brainwashed into believing that the direct-download sites are "safer". All it will take is one of them getting sued and happily forking over all the logs and financial records. Than again, odds are that some of them are already controlled by MPAA etc as a result of some behind-the-scenes settlements.

No such thing was possible with BitTorrent as a vast majority of tracker sites are anonymous. The snobs participating in "private trackers" had more elevated levels of exposure because of their "registration" process offered additional levels of forensic evidence. In fact most P2P systems offer as the only point of identification the IP Address, which does not immediately translate into a personal identification (unlike your MasterCard with which you paid RapidShare) due to dynapmic IP assignments, possible WiFi holes, access by other people to your computer and what not.

In short, it will take only a series of mega-busts of MegaUpload users, followed by rapid (due to excellent and undeniable forensic evidence) convictions, until the lemmings will run back to more anonymous and thus more sane methods of file-sharing.

BitTorrent, IRC and Usenet have been shut down for years. I dare you to try to get anything from them! It's impossible. They have been literally shut down by the MPAA and RIAA.

We are left with one alternative: Rapidshare. Sure, it's not perfect but that's all we have after the effective campaigns of the RIAA and MPAA. Now it looks like they'll have to focus all their attention on Rapidshare. Darn. Then we will be left with nothing.

But to reiterate, no need to focus on BitTorrent, IRC or Usenet - those are already dead. Yup. Dead and buried. Nothing to see there.

it doesn't have to use a "paid/premium" account to access those files and it automates a lot of the tedious aspects of the free versions of the services.plus there are services out there meant for uploading to those file hosting services, anonymously and automatically, as well as payment services from various countries that don't share the bed with the lobbyists like the US/UK/France that handle the payment services as well as proxy services...

yes...I can go on and on.It's a cat-and-mouse game, where the mouse usually is more savy and has a head-start.

No, its first time I hear of the thing, although the concept is rather old and has been done in response to previous scam sites trying to obfuscate or lock contents and get people to pay for releasing it. Naturally the operators if the scam sites will do everything in their power to prevent this "jdownloader" from working (as they are "losing" their ad revenue and "premium account" money to it as it makes "free" downloading less of an getting-a-root-canal-dentistry-experience th

In short: they are not available in most countries, in many where they allow them they do not work online and in the last remaining few places the FATF is doing their best to make them unusable online. I do not expect that fight to last very long, by 2011 or so none of them will work online anymore.

Stop calling these sites a scam. Bandwidth is not free (nor cheap) and the amount of gigabytes transferred on these sites daily is huge. They don't limit download speed for free users to be mean, or force you to pay for the service; there are physical limits to these things, and that translates into free users getting the blunt end of the stick. These sites provide a legitimate service, whether you think it is worth it or not is up to you, obviously a lot of people seem to think the service is worth it. The

Prepaid cards definitely leave a trail, even if it's a little harder to follow. Most stores won't allow you to pay for them in cash (partly for this exact reason, partly due to anti-money laundering laws), and in any case they're more often given out as rebate cards for whatever reason and are definitely traceable unless the issuer is in complete violation of their contract with Visa/Mastercard. It may be a two-step process, but thinking using prepaid debit cards as if they're anonymous is _not_ a good id

"stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it."

Do you live in the US? I live right in the middle of it, and an extremely large number of business now refuse to accept $50 or $100 bills. I assume they would cite counterfeiting as the concern, but I think it's pure bullshit.

If you do business in the US, you ought to have to accept US currency.

"stores always have to accept cash. it is legal tender, you can't not take it."

Do you live in the US? I live right in the middle of it, and an extremely large number of business now refuse to accept $50 or $100 bills. I assume they would cite counterfeiting as the concern, but I think it's pure bullshit.

If you do business in the US, you ought to have to accept US currency.

If you are owed money in the UK, you must accept legal tender: Bank of England notes of value £50, £20, £10 and £5, coins of value £5, £2, £1 in any amount, up to £10 worth of 50p and 20p; up to £5 of 10p and 5p, and up to 20p of 2p and 1p. You can (of course) accept anything else.

When you ask to buy something from a shop, you don't owe anyone any money, so the shopkeeper can decided what to accept. Many won't accept £50 notes.

So, the bus driver is allowed to refuse to take your £50 note, or your handful of 1p coins. But if you get a fine for not having a ticket they have to accept legal tender for payment of the fine.

That was started by these little gas station/convenience stores, who found that keeping enough change to deal with fifties and hundreds made them an inviting target for crackheads, which in case you ain't heard tend to have the annoying habit lately of just shooting the employees and then robbing the corpses.

So you really can't blame them for trying to protect their employees a little. I personally think all those little gas station/convenience stores should have set up what the sheriff the next county over

not going to dump the whole thing but"There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, mov

you're giving your average pirate *way* too much credit on their intelligence.

BitTorrent is really popular because it's obscenely easy. You install the torrent client, and you just grab the torrent itself. it has nothing to do with a cat and mouse game, it's just an evolution on usefulness.

In fact most P2P systems offer as the only point of identification the IP Address, which does not immediately translate into a personal identification

Apparently you've not been following the RIAA lawsuit mill. According to them (and the majority of courts which have bought into it) an IP address is unquestionable proof of identity. The fact that it's not doesn't matter if you've been screwed into the ground by a frivolous lawsuit.

No, nobody will ever be convicted of anything. They may be found LIABLE after the RIAA proves a preponderance of the evidence is in their favor but nobody is getting convicted of anything. There's a reason the MAFIAA keeps using civil suits rather than trying to pursue things in criminal courts.

sorry to be rude, but not all countries adhere to the crazy copyright laws that the USA does. according to my interpretation of current Canadian law (which could very well be incorrect) the levies i pay on blank media go to the riaa/mpaa/canadian equivalents and i am allowed to download as much as i want. this doesn't mean i'm allowed to distribute as much as i want, but with a centralized server which is download only, that's not the problem that it would be with bittorrent, in which you're required to both send and receive.

not too mention that rapidshare et. al have an air of legitimacy, as they take down any files which are reported to contain content they aren't legally allowed to distribute. of course, "they don't have the resources to check every single file that is uploaded to their servers," only the ones that are reported. And the only reason rapidshare does that is because they are a German-owned company (if i recall correctly). some countries, like Colombia and Egypt don't adhere to any copyright law. presumably a company owned and operated in a place like that would be virtually immune to any information requests from the MAFIAA and their ilk.

it surprises me, given the invention and popularity of the internet, how many americans still struggle to think globally, and still assume that the rest of the world on their terms. this is not intended to be a troll or flamebait or personal insult, it's merely my own stated opinion.

Actually the law is not like that in US, thats why its crazy. If ONLY the author were the copyright holder and the only one with those rights, it would made some sense. However, the US system allows "transfer of ownership", thats the death trap. The original US copyrights lasted 14 years, and were meant to put a stop to perpetual rights of printer guilds in UK. Today, these "printer guilds" (corporations) have restored their hereditary powers. For this reason, if you are not going to fix it, we are going to ignore it, or even better, legalize non-profit sharing and put an end to the abuse.

You keep your US only Hulu and your DRMed iTunes, i keep my worldwide p2p file sharing sites and my anonymous p2p networks. If artists want money, they better start touring or taking direct donations, i don't believe in third parties "owning" content and exploiting said artists beyond their lives. Or the corporate state imposing their rule to the world.

Are you kidding me? Most of the stuff being "shared" on p2p networks IS NOT 14 years old...it's movies, music, and software that just came out. If it was about some ideal of what copyright law *should* be, you and people like you would still be respecting copyright within the timeframe that you think it should be. But you don't, and it's hilarious to see you try to justify it as something noble when it's really slightly less than theft.

They steal from us, we steal from them. Let's see who breaks first.Maybe we'll reach a stage where some kind of peace agreement is the only way forward. Reasonable copyright terms being one of the clauses.

1. Disney pilfers the public domain to create a "new work", for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Aladdin.2. Disney changes just enough to allow the work to be copyrighted.3. Disney enjoys the privileges of copyright until they would expire, then purchases a renewal by way of lobbyists and campaign contributions.

To summarize, media cartels are parasites that steal from the public domain (or "myth pool" for the advanced readers out there) while contributing as little as possible. I hope this answers your question of how "they" have stolen from us.

As has been said many times here, copyright is really only ethical as a means of preventing others from profiting off creators' work. Corporate controlled copyright has perverted copyright by exploiting artists more often than not, while increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of material. People have always shared information, and while p2p reduces revenue, it's more a reduction from "obscenely fucking profitable" to just "fucking profitable".

God this is hilarious. "Crazy copyright law" is law that says only the copyright holder has the legal right to produce and distribute copies of his/her work?

Crazy copyright law is the US's copyright law - a place where any company can come around and hand someone a DMCA takedown notice, and your legit stuff(music, art, photos, whatever) that you own copyrights to are removed because of the allegation.

Your laws blow. Wasn't there an article saying the DMCA was used properly less than 10% of the time? Get over it and fix your laws - until then, I'm praying to god no other countries adopt them.

Unfortunately, you're screwed. Why do you think other nations are 'harmonizing' their copyright laws with the US?

Good luck with that. Every time our Canadian government tries that shit, we either kick their asses out or we storm their headquarters and threaten to kick their asses out.
They've tried the Canadian DMCA 3 times now only to be defeated every time. Canadians will not put up with that crap. Once you tell Grandma that she can't copy a song to her ipod, there's no hope for the gov't.
This faulty American DMCA legislation is probably the reason we now have minority governments. That's not a bad thing. They have to work together or get booted out.
America is on life support anyway. Not as important as she thinks, and soon to die from her own overindulgence and greed.

Bring on the trolls mutherfucker. Mod me into oblivion... I could care less.

Preventing everyone from producing something just because someone else has produced that same thing before. Yes, from the economic, legal and ethical perspectives, it falls very close to the realm of 'crazy'. And it certainly isn't compatible with a free market economy. Even the use of the phrase 'legal right to produce' indicates how far from a free market it is.

This is all about people who don't have enough money to buy something,

the Holy Grail of RIAA, MPAA and BSA snooping campaigns: actual financial transactions of these donwloaders which immediately yield their identities and bonus preculde any possible defense of "sharing between friends" as there is actual money changing hands.

Uh? I pay money for my ISP, so there's actual money changing hands no matter what I do online. They'll need a stronger connection than that to get anywhere.

"Gift" (i.e. anonymous and prepaid) credit cards do not exist in many countries, and in many of those that allow them the cards do not work online.... precisely because they are anonymous. In fact the whole idea of "gift" cards is being considered a loophole that goes against the recommendations of FATF (Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering). Anonymity is a precious commodity and is considered a weapon in the "Wars" on Terrorism, Drug

BT (and any other pure P2P system) is safer simply because there are additional hoops for the MPAAs of the world to jump through (like ISPs and privacy laws) to get your identity and even so such identity is unreliable (unless your lawyer is a dolt or you have been completely unprepared and are keeping all your downloaded stuff in the open, have no WiFi routers etc).

This is of course not an impregnable defence but its orders of magnitude harder to crack then simply asking MegaUpload for all your downloads in your account, cross-correlated with your identity coming from your financial record (note that the prickly ISP problem has been circumnavigated neatly).

P2P can be made far more secure, and it has been, like for example the Japanese Winny system (which was a cross between something like FreeNet and a typical P2P system like Gnutella) and its more modern successor the Perfect Dark. If coupled with steganographic storage, good user practices and other tricks, such systems can be made near-impractical to crack, to the point that mere knowledge of the IP address is (practically) useless from the perspective of copyright witch-hunters.

Dude, you do not seem to understand. Prepaid cards are a money laundering loophole, far more serious to the powers-that-be than some nerds downloading pilfered porn off of RapidShare. You are thinking: "merry mouse-and-cat chases with the RIAA", they are thinking: "Osama Bin Laden agents paying for communications and bomb components". It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going to happen in this case.

We can only accept so much "protection" before we delve into "revolution" once the people realize they are being "protected" right out of their ability to participate in society. Gift cards might be a "loophole" for them mean and evil "terrists" but the fact is those folks are gonna get money no matter what - but without the ability for POOR PEOPLE who have zero credit and no bank accounts to participate in society the folks on Pennsylvania Ave would end up with way more to worry about than a handful of radical nutcases.

We have become a culture of plastic money. Financially deprived people need access to that plastic as well.

fun fact. anyone downloading junk from these sites is probably downloading an encrypted container file like rar or 7zip, under a completely false file

Really? How then do you find this file? Unless you and your buddies are into psychic connections, there is somewhere, where a lot of you turkeys congregate, a "translation" to the real contents and the password to extract it. Unless you expect MPAAs of the world to be illiterate, they can read it as well as you do. Considering yourself oh-soooo-much-smarter-t

Agreed... But really though, rs is going to overtake torrents the day that users decide manually downloading 800 pieces of a file from a server is easier than letting an app do it for you (from a network of peers, none the less).

with things moving away from p2p and back to the client-server model, the number of people open to lawsuits drops dramatically. downloaders are no longer forced to upload, so they're no longer "making available", the the most they can be realistically charged with is making one copy.

Erm, but the whole weakness of the client-server model is that there's a single point of failure - the server. Napster got taken down easily. I don't care if these sites are hosting other fiels amongst illegal torrents, you better believe the MAFIAA will sue the fuck out of Rapidshare and/or they'll just remove these torrents as much as they can.

Definitely not news. Before peer-to-peer became a buzzword, a common way of distributing this kind of thing was to slit it into lots of rar files and upload each to a free hosting service. Things like i-drive and geocities, for example, would host things for free with something like a 10MB limit. A 100MB file would be split across ten of these sites and there'd be a web page somewhere with links to them all. The individual components had innocuous names, and the hosting companies couldn't tell that they

They'll continue to make more and more draconian laws. In twenty years, they'll be threatening people with fifty years in the electric chair with a gerbil up their arse, and it will have done nothing to solve the problem. And between websites, new protocols, new control methods, demands to the ISPs, and all of that, the community will survive on shifting sands, always staying one step ahead of their pursuers because it takes time to legislate and administrate a response to what is inherently a social movement without any defined leaders or organizational structure. They cannot beat the economics of the situation, no matter how much technology or social control, or legal action they take: Which is that the cost of reproduction is effectively zero.

They will do everything they can to make distribution as expensive as possible, enforcing ludicrous bandwidth caps and trying to control the internet as much as they can. Eventually, it'll reach a critical point where the cost of forming a new decentralized network will become cheaper than continuing to use the old methods of communication, and the community will give birth to the successor to the internet. It's something of an irony that the internet was created on the ideas of free information exchange and ensuring that an open line of communication would always be possible between its participants turning into a profit-orientated tool by greedy corporations. But while they may someday succeed in control of the network, they will have done nothing to attack the ideals upon which it was originally built, and so long as those ideals live, it will continue to rematerialize like the goddamned phoenix, generation after generation, even as society claims to have no use for it.

Everything adapts. Software will be something you rent on the Internet and never resides on your computer.

Music? The situation in China has "evolved" to the point where there is no more recorded music sold (or produced). In the West check your local radio stations... what is selling there is oldies. What will continue to "sell" will be music from the previous century and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.

Everything adapts. Software will be something you rent on the Internet and never resides on your computer.

In your dreams, and Microsoft's perhaps. On *my* computer? I think not.

Music? The situation in China has "evolved" to the point where there is no more recorded music sold (or produced).

Been to China lately? When I was there last April, I saw plenty of Chinese music [wikipedia.org] for sale.

(And my gf, who is from Canton, has boatloads of the stuff.)

In the West check your local radio stations... what is selling there is oldies. What will continue to "sell" will be music from the previous century and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.

I'm sure these guys [www.sr.se] (whom we listen to in the office nearly every day) will be interested in learning that Miss Li [missli.se] sounds like she recorded her stuff in the 1920s because she actually did...?

Movies? Eliminate digital distribution (DVDs) and you eliminate the problem.

User generated content? Check out YouTube for that, especially ShayTards and Magibon. This is the height of user-generated content and people are starting to discover (realize?) that it is crap. All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.

(I am going to burn in Hell for this, but...)

[citation needed]

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay. This is going to require a major adaptation that most "media" and "entertainment" isn't going to survive, but the adaptation will eventually succeed.

No, only in your fantasy will it really all be free. Someone has to pay, and patronage doesn't work.

No, what we've got is a generation that views the 'Every conceivable juxtaposition of eyes/ears with content entails a licence fee' model with derision. And rightly so.

So we all have to pay for what we consume.

Please tell that to the rich folk who got that way by finding some way not to pay for something (a lot of something). Which would be most of them.

User generated content? All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.

It won't be the whole future but it's here to stay whether you like it or not. User generated content is being used as the entire basis for mainstream media content sometimes now, such as in this news story about the "wedding dance video". [brisbanetimes.com.au] You are way off base if you think this type of content isn't going to have a place in mainstream entertainment.

What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay.

Like with free to air TV and radio? Free content is hardly a new thing, for many people a significant portion of their entertainment has been free (ad supported) content for decades.

The idea that people aren't willing to pay is a lie anyway and everyone who promotes the idea knows it. iTunes proved that. If you provide the product or service people want they will pay for it. Make paid for DRM free downloads available at the right price and most people won't bother with "pirate" sites with even minimal risk of getting caught. Just having predictable quality movie and music files will win people over on convenience over illegal downloads.

RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally.

RS et al is more than happy to take down anything determined to be a violation of copyright. PirateBay et al stood up and said "fuck off". This doesn't jive with the workflow IP capital demands under the DMCA. Yes, the DMCA is a parochial piece of shit that is only enforceable in the states, but given the size and power of the USA system and its networks, it only makes sense to appease the DMCA as it is the more restrictive of the nationalist bullshit rules re: IP copyright.

RS, mediafire, and others will take down stuff when someone complains. Hence, by "killing its own" it becomes much more resilient, as one gets the whack-a-mole effect, but with this major structural difference: with pirate Bay / napster etc. when the system is brought down, resurrecting or building a new network is very time consuming and difficult. with the RS/megaupload/mediafire/etc. model, they own they field on which whack-a-mole is played. So by letting the rights holders chase the pirates, RS et al get to profit on the churn.

The next thing will be blogs dedicated to software with links to DLs of the stuff in RS et al, similar to music blogs now, and then a master system to search it all, similar to chewbone.

These sites use advanced authentication methods, such as reverse authentication look-up to local FTP daemon. Anonymous might not allways work if the address that you're coming from doesn't look 3l33+ enough, you might have to use your own userid and password. Also, disabling or enabling a proxy might help.

Also, simple PC's with Wind0wz are also totally off the limits. Go to your shell account and use a real operating systems. L4m3rs without multitasking can't get in.

Given they haven't paid attention for the last 20 years, somehow I don't think they're going to start.

Yes BT was 100% free. And I was against paying for anything. But with that of which we do not speak, TV and Movies are closer to VOD. My cable company just upgraded me to 1.4MB/s... I can get a 30 minute TV show in 3 minutes. I can get a whole movie in 10-15, enough time to pop popcorn and get settled in. It's well worth the $11 I spend on it.

Rapidshare is a central source, that stores the actual illegal data, and even charges money for it. How are they better protected than "bittorrent", which is not even a real target? Apart from the "activism" side of it, nobody gives two shits about The Pirate Bay being shot down. Anyone can setup a webserver in their basement that serves a bunch of links, but who can recreate rapidshare if it goes down?

"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.

Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner,
but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".

"Illegal content replication" just doesn't sound as snazzy and dirty as "piracy".

Wrong.
For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is also commonly referred to as piracy (an early reference was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 when he said of his novel True-born Englishman : "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"[2]). The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself. Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company o

"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.

You may be interested to know that "piracy" is also a term used by the cable and satellite-TV companies to refer to using their signal without paying them. Do you really think companies are going to spend $50 million or $100 million dollars putting satellites up into the sky if the whole world says, "I don't have to pay you; but I get all the channels for free"?

Once this short and partial relapse to centralized commercial services will unevitably be sued to pieces (I mean, duh...), the next evolutionary step _will_ be anonymized P2P.
The excellent OneSwarm protocol (implemented and working today!) has a very good change of becoming "the sh*t" when it comes to this I think, and I'm very surprised by the low buzz concerning it:
http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ [washington.edu]
And for more general use, something like the (not equally yet implemented) Phantom protocol will probably have a place in the market too:
http://code.google.com/p/phantom/wiki/MainPage [google.com]

The trouble with anonymous P2P is that its either a darknet where you only share with friends, which is safe in theory but impractical to build on a large scale or an opennet, which means you share with everybody. And when you have an opennet there is no guarantee that the cops won't come knocking on your door for sharing child porn, even if it happened in the background without your knowledge.

And while no such lawsuits have been brought forward for anonymous P2P so far, there is precedence, open WiFi spots

JDownloader has really come into its own over the last few months. Older versions were prone to errors, dropped links and excessive CPU usage, but the current version does very well. As the program has grown, it also keeps up much better with changes in hoster page layout (which can break downloads).

Usenet is not particularly useful unless you spend money. File hosting services are generally quite usable for free (granted, I don't have a big download pipe, so I can still max it out with the free options.) Bittorrent is 100% usable without spending money.

I understand the arguments in favor of Usenet, but the truth is the competing services are way better when your main goal is to spend no money at all.

If you think hard about this, you will be forced to side with the original poster. Consider changing 100% to 50% and it's mostly clear that "was" is the correct word. It's not important that more than one piece of software comprises the 100%, the important thing is that the verb must agree with the percentage (not the warez), and a percentage is singular. Or, consider removing the phrase "of the warez", so only the percentage is left in the sentence, and obviously "was" is correct. Still, it's fairly subtle

I don't know, that doesn't make it obvious to me. "Was" would be OK if we were talking about a bulk noun - "50% of the water was left in the glass" is right, but *"50% of the apples was left in the basket" sounds obviously wrong to me. I'm now trying to figure out if "warez" is a bulk noun or not, and actually it may well be. *"I downloaded 10 warez yesterday" does sound wrong, which it shouldn't if "warez" is a plural; but the "z" in "warez" suggests that it derives from a plural form.